TACKLING CHILDHOOD BRAIN CANCER

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Brain cancer remains a lethal and disabling disease, the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among children under age 20 and the third-leading cause in young adults aged 20-39. This is in contrast to childhood leukemia and other blood cancers, where survival and quality of life have improved markedly based on improved classification and novel targeted therapies implemented at diagnosis. There are particularly aggressive forms of brain cancer, with barely 10 percent of children and young adults surviving three years after diagnosis, and other forms where those who do survive suffer severe lifelong disabilities due to the life-saving therapies they receive.

While structural variants (SVs) are known to play an important role in many childhood brain cancers, these large-scale variants (generally defined as >30kb) can be difficult to detect using standard Illumina DNA or RNA reads. Our group applied long-read (Nanopore) and pseudo-long read (10X Genomics linked-reads) sequencing to tumor samples in order to assess the strength of these technologies in subtypes known to contain structural variants as well as to look for SVs in those with no identified driver mutations.

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Read more at: Genome Canada

COLLABORATORS

Nada Jabado, PhD - McGill University

Jacek Majewski, PhD - McGill University

Michael Taylor, PhD - SickKids Hospital

Genome Canada

Funding provided by LSARP grant

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OUR TEAM

Melissa Zwaig